Melody Set Me Free
Melody Set Me Free (2007)
Created, written, and led by: Kalup Linzy
Before Empire used melodrama to satirize the Black art/music world, artist Kalup Linzy created epic Black soap operas, lip synching and performing nearly all the voices and most of the characters, screened in galleries and YouTube.
OTV syndicated Melody Set Me Free to archive it as a significant work of indie television and compensate Linzy for their early innovation in the YouTube economy. In Melody Set Me Free Linzy produces a committed narrative about struggles over capital where race, class, gender and sexuality are spectacularly visible through his body and those of other artists whose voices have been silenced during the expansion of information empires. Indeed, Melody Set Me Free suggests that only by putting identities in explicit tension in a relentless melodrama can we understand what agency, if any, they can have in a creative economy.
Kalup Linzy’s work incorporates performance, music and video. He started shooting soaps in high school and continued through grad school. “My professors told me they were too lo-fi for TV but they weren’t art, either,” he told the New York Times. Linzy’s dense narratives told in the style of TV soaps have attracted considerable attention. A number of those videos are also satires of the art world, as in “As Da Art World Might Turn,” the fifth installment of his Conversations wit de Churen series. Though nearly all his videos engage with the scope and form of soap opera. Linzy draws on his lifelong love of soaps, a personal but also national activity, as inspiration for his art practice.
Melody Set Me Free began as a 2007 short about contestants in an American Idol-style competition: "Vying to win a recording contest, they must take a Whitney Houston song and make it their own” (EAI).The first season of the series released in 2010 fuses the 2007 short with another, “KK Queens Survey,” where “a New York artist/diva who submits to an outrageous telephone survey on her artistic and personal practices. A sample question: "Metaphorically speaking, how many asses have you kissed today?"”The second and third seasons of Melody Set Me Free were released from February to September in 2012 on James Franco’s Rabbit.TV. But most of the coverage from this period focused on Linzy’s 2011 appearance on General Hospital in a cameo role in a longer-running plot involving Franco as a multimedia artist and serial killer.
Melody Set Me Free tells the story of KK Queen, head of KK Queen Surveys and Records, who is trying to promote Patience and a diverse group of artists to sell “nasty-ass hits” to the public. Her “villain” is Hope, whose husband she married and kids with, allowing her to secure her media empire (the kids work for her). Among many other revelations and backstabs, Hope shoots KK, and Patience, whose labor KK consistently misuses, is eventually revealed to be her daughter. KK has a moment to realize that in her pursuit of power she has forgotten family, hoarded capital and acted in self-interest. But in the end she finds her hit. The show is an explicit commentary on television executed as a hybrid of key genres in its history: Dynasty (network primetime soap) meets American Idol (network game show) meets The Sopranos (cable primetime soap)
Natasha Lyonne in Melody Set Me Free
Melody Set Me Free has never received full consideration as a work of art or television, particularly as it has been overshadowed by Linzy’s collaborations with James Franco. And yet, at 150 minutes spread across three seasons it is among the most ambitious productions in black or queer web television. Why does one produce two and half hours of a black queer art soap opera?
Melody Set Me Free addresses why primetime serialization developed this way, with women, queers and people of color left out, by reproducing serial melodrama in black queer art form. In the competitive post-network television economy, melodrama is a source of power. When successful it produces stable, engaged, loyal audiences grateful to brands for financing their stories. Melodrama must be serialized because characters drive the story and audiences follow characters. Having powerful characters increases the drama of the story efficiently for TV channels focused on accruing capital when bodies are harder to organize in large blocks.
As white characters pervaded expensive prime time serials in the 2000s when they show was made – not to mention the writers and decision makers behind the camera – Melody Set Me Free brings the margins to the center, starting a genealogy of television storytelling with women of color, queer or trans bodies, on whom corporations have always counted as fans primetime soaps, as sole agents of the narrative. KK Queen’s quest for empire recalls those of Game of Thrones’ Daenarys Targaryean or Breaking Bad’s Walter White, but she and her counterparts cannot exist outside of race, gender, sexuality, or class; and can never be separated from Linzy, an independent television worker, the writer, director, producer, editor and voice of the story; Melody Set Me Free is his quest to re-produce empire outside the logics of the industry’s commercial apparatus, distilling “television” in black queer art.
Melody Set Me Free tells the story of how, as José Muñoz wrote, “hybrid, racially predicated, and deviantly gendered identities” negotiate, survive and pursue power across and within communication forms. In every second, Linzy, in character and art direction, actively produces representations power marginalizes. I believe this goes a long way of explaining Melody Set Me Free’s commitment to produce a linear narrative (its “consumable,” unlike Trecartin), because no such narrative exists: as daytime soap operas get canceled on television, there has never been a daytime black soap, let along black queer soap. Such a narrative only exists in the imaginations of TV’s spectators whose spectatorship grows increasingly undervalued, and so must be – and is, in everyday imagination – produced and embodied in order to reach a future with different power relations. The web series is what information empire fails to value, a story by and about the margins from the perspective of the viewers whose desires and imaginations it profits from, in a form they can delightfully consume.
In Melody Set Me Free power and its pursuit drives the narrative. After two and a half hours of insistent drama, Melody Set Me Free ends season three with one of KK Queen’s art surveys. One of her new workers is interviewing artists about their art community. As the camera pans a bookcase, including books from the Sundance Film Festival and Artforum, the last question on the survey is read:
In your art community how would you describe the powers that be?
A: Amazing
B: Alright
C: Above Average
D: Balanced
E: Touch
F: Psycho
The psychosis of contemporary cultural production is Linzy’s guide. So he releases this melodrama on the web, the heart and veins of networked information empires, where expanded, undervalued productions and user-generated information (Facebook likes, YouTube views, cookies) generate massive amounts and multiple forms of capital for media industries. Linzy makes this story about the struggle over capital, performed by agents who are visibly, differently and always raced and gendered, in ways the audience cannot completely comprehend and so must consistently labor to embody and create subjectivity for in the process of viewing. By “quaring” television and art, it takes ours “eyeballs” out of the market and refocuses them on stories and their laborers. Linzy takes the television’s commodity, the viewer's life and body out of capital circulation – for an urgent moment – and into the lives voiced by Linzy, the hero and villain of art and television.